Commentary Magazine

Weaponized misinformation is hardly a new phenomenon. Its effect on the 2016 presidential race has, however, been exceptionally ominous. A campaign of deliberate deceptions involving but not limited to foreign entities seeking to disrupt the American political process to their own ends should be ringing alarm bells for patriotic American voters. But there’s no one left to ring them; the stewards of objective discourse have been discredited in the minds of those this campaign has targeted. The age in which there was universally understood and incontrovertible truth is over. The information age has given way to something more closely resembling its antonym.

Republicans know in the core of their being that the Russian government does not have America’s best interests in mind. They know, too, that the clandestine information laundering outfit WikiLeaks, to which the Russian government is inexorably tied, is an anti-American institution. They have outed American assets abroad, jeopardized their lives, and made it less likely that potential operatives will work with U.S. soldiers, contractors, or intelligence agents to advance U.S. objectives. They know all this, but they put it all aside this year because these enemies of the United States found common cause in a Republican political objective: defeating Hillary Clinton.

To that end, the Russian government has infiltrated the Democratic Party’s committees and, using WikiLeaks as a proxy, released reams of information from the private email accounts of Democratic officials and Clinton operatives. It appears that not all of that material is, however, genuine. The FBI and several American intelligence agencies are investigating the likelihood that some of those documents were altered to reflect poorly on Clinton, her associates, and Democratic elected officials.

As the election has grown closer and the effort to install a chaos agent like Donald Trump in the White House grows more desperate, so, too, has this misinformation campaign. “The Podestas’ “Spirit Cooking” dinner? It’s not what you think,” teased the WikiLeaks Twitter account, citing more emails stolen from the personal email account of the Clinton campaign’s chairman. “It’s blood, sperm, and breastmilk. But mostly blood.”

There is no evidence that the vast majority of the emails stolen from Democrats by foreign intelligence agencies are at all falsified, but the banality of most of those communications has led the conservative movement to go chasing waterfalls. The most amateurish falsified documents confirming the worst of the right’s biases against Clinton (like a childish “invoice” remunerating the Black Panthers and the “Sharia Law Center” for services rendered) are embraced by the right’s prominent voices and find their way on the airwaves.

This is the greatest tragedy of it all. Propagandistic information warfare campaigns are only as successful as the credulity of their targets. And this year, led by a man who has an unequivocally antagonistic relationship with the truth, the American right has been so willfully gullible that they gave rise to a new industry.

An investigation conducted by BuzzFeed News recently discovered that at least 140 pro-Trump “conservative news” websites being operated out of Veles, Macedonia by a group of teenagers and 20-somethings generates up to $5,000 per month from misinformation. By repackaging falsities purporting to reveal Bill Clinton’s sexual improprieties, Barack Obama’s foreign birth, and the anti-white racism of Clinton supporters, et cetera, these provocateurs have skillfully exploited the naiveté of the American political media consumer.

The profit model is ingenious. These stories become revenue generators by virtue of their organic sharing potential on social media outlets like Facebook, which has become the chief source of news for millions. The alacrity with which a lie that confirms the biases of Facebook-obsessed Trump supporting information consumers can spread is terrifying.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to the right. Nor is it unique to 2016. It is, however, a function of how distasteful objective truth has become to the Republican presidential nominee that some on the right have this year become hostile to objectivity. The polls are rigged; the election is fixed; the nation’s institutions are infested with traitors—this toxic paranoia has consequences. The irony of the right’s reliance on juicy and conspiratorial misinformation is that they have failed to build a credible case against Hillary Clinton. In chasing illusory silver bullets, the right only made one of the most disliked and scandal-plagued candidates to run for the White House stronger.

Information itself is suspect. Voters retreat into information fiefdoms, cloistered in small cliques on social media, comforted by the preferable delusions with which they are buffeted daily by sources both foreign and domestic. This is embittering, self-defeating, and alienating. And so they retreat deeper into Facebook and the lies they so covet. There are no more gatekeepers; no trusted sources of objective truth. This is a trend with dire consequences for representative democracy. The earliest of those consequences are already upon us.

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Does liberal opinion permit Europeans to discuss the burka openly, honestly, and fearlessly?

The answer is almost certainly “no,” judging by the furious reaction that greeted Boris Johnson’s recent remarks on the full face veil donned by many fundamentalist Muslim women. “If you tell me that the burka is oppressive then I am with you,” the former U.K. foreign secretary wrote in a recent column for the Telegraph newspaper. “I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letterboxes.”

The left and much of the right assailed him, including his ex-boss, Prime Minister Theresa May. The main charge was that Johnson suffers from a dangerous and likely incurable condition: “Islamophobia.” Few of his many critics bothered to note that Johnson was writing in opposition to a Danish ban on the burka. Johnson is unquestionably burka-phobic, but there is scant evidence, either in his column or his long public career, that he is any sort of anti-Muslim bigot.

The column was classic “BoJo.” Johnson is the jocular type—Britons would say “cheeky”—perhaps to a fault. But more than most of the dullards who rise to the higher echelons in Europe, he has his finger on the popular pulse. Johnson knows that anxiety over the burka courses through the whole European body politic.

Few native Europeans dare voice it honestly. If a former top diplomat is raked over the intersectionality coals for doing so, imagine what would happen to Average Joe. But the anxiety is real enough. And it is legitimate, because the sight of the burka in the public square crystalizes the sense that European immigration and assimilation policy has gone horribly wrong. Concluding that this is so isn’t tantamount to hatred.

Constantly bottling up anxiety, moreover, is no less unhealthy for a collective psyche than it is for the individual. Allow me, then, to voice my own burka­-phobia as a former resident of the U.K., who had grown accustomed to, say, landing at Heathrow Airport and finding myself surrounded by fully veiled faces on the express train to central London.

Actually, “accustomed” isn’t the right word, for I never quite got used to eyes without a face—to the encounter with a hidden subject, who was free to gaze into my features but who deflected my attempts to reciprocate her gaze. Eyes Without a Face, incidentally, is the title of a chilling cult horror flick from 1960, which attests to the fact that most people find free-floating, disembodied, faceless eyes deeply disturbing. (Sometimes even the eyes were hidden behind a thin mesh screen, a mechanism that completely erased the individuality of this Other.)

So, no, I never got accustomed to the burka. But it was an encounter that I had no choice but to tolerate. I was born and raised in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Muslim veiling was thus not alien to me. Imagine, then, the discomfort of the plumber or electrician from London’s more blue-collar precincts. Now add to that cultural discomfort a prohibition against expressing any discomfort, enforced on pain of social ostracism and joblessness. It’s a recipe for populist backlash.

Does all this mean that I would support a blanket ban against the full-face veil? Probably not. As much as I fret about the incohesive society bred by the burka’s presence in Europe, I also worry about the Continent’s high-handed secular progressivism. I wouldn’t want to give state agents the right to regulate religious practices in Europe, because I’m sure that those agents would go out of their way to target faithful Jews and Christians, not least to shield themselves from the same charge of Islamophobia that they casually hurl at the likes of Johnson.

But I do think that Europeans have a right to deplore the burka. Western civilization locates the dignity of men and women in their individuality, including in their facial features. The liberal reflex to silence, in the name of tolerance, those who insist on the real virtues and character of European civilization will only further radicalize the opposition. Such liberal illiberalism is not a little like a vast burka forcibly wrapped around the European mind.

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As the saying goes, you can never put the toothpaste back in the tube. Donald Trump is setting a number of precedents, many of which conservatives and Republicans will come to regret when they are cited and expanded upon by the Democrats who succeed him. But Trump’s status as a figure of cultural gravitas is not one of those precedents. Trump is only building upon a legacy that was bequeathed to him by his predecessor.

New York Times opinion writer, author, and Columbia University Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan has authored a thoughtful essay on the nature of fame. As a transgender activist and a former reality television star, she knows what it is like to be famous. She’s written a valuable exploration of a sought-out status that once achieved is often regretted. But her jumping off point—presidential fame, as opposed to influence and authority—deserves more attention.

“In considering the question of fame, though, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that the current occupant of the White House is less interested in the good works he might bring about than the fame that comes with the position,” Boylan writes of Donald Trump. Fame is a condition that comes with the oath of office, but Trump secured his fame long ago and took it with him into the White House. That kind of fame—fame for the sake of personal aggrandizement and not toward some noble end—tends to be corrupting, Boylan writes, and is often a source of regret for those who achieve it. Though she might believe the fame that Barack Obama achieved in office was a burden he bore in service to the greater good, Boylan nevertheless notes that the 44th president came to regret his notoriety. At least, that’s what he claimed.

“Barack Obama, appearing on Jerry Seinfeld’s show ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’ a couple of years ago, seemed to regret being one of the world’s most famous people,” she writes. A world-famous comedian’s comedy talk show is an odd choice of venue for confessing one’s discomfort with the spotlight. “In particular,” Boylan continues, “the president lamented, he missed the ability to just walk down the street talking with a friend unnoticed.” If Obama truly lamented his celebrity, he would have performed a more thoughtful audit of its effects not just on his life but on those around him and the country he led. It would be interesting to probe the former president’s thoughts on the matter today, particularly given his unique successor.

Barack Obama and his allies chafed at a 2008 campaign spot that implied he was more of an empty suit than a candidate of substance, but none could credibly deny the president sought out and achieved “Celebrity.” Obama made numerous appearances on non-news programs like “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert and David Letterman, “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “American Idol,” “MythBusters,” “Ellen,” “Running Wild with Bear Grylls,” and so on. The president gave ESPN exclusive broadcast access to his NCAA brackets and joked with his favorite FM radio hosts. “People get their news in many different ways,” Obama’s campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki told Politico. “Sometimes it’s turning on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and seeing what the latest news is out there.”

He was described as “too good” at social media. The former president demonstrated a knack for engaging with the young and hip on platforms that reward brevity and platitudes and punishes depth and sincerity. The first family mastered tweeting gifs, Snapchatting playful family moments, and Instagramming impromptu White House dance sessions and presidential posing sessions alongside George Clooney.

Obama’s appearance with Seinfeld occurred in 2015, and it was hardly the first or last time the president sought out forgiving alternative media venues. The former president’s IMDb page lists the accolades more often associated with a teen heartthrob than a commander-in-chief. The president received two Grammy awards and an Image award before he assumed the presidency, nominations for Teen Choice Awards, Kid’s Choice Awards, Mashable’s Tweet of the Year, and, of course, winner of the 2014 Streamy Award for best collaboration (with comedian Zach Galifianakis). The White House communications team deserved that honor more than the president. It was the White House Office of Public Engagement that organized a series of presidential sit-downs with the friendly and unchallenging young hosts of online media outlets, deliberately bypassing the legacy press in the process.

Republicans sneered at all of this, and many civically minded conservatives were sincere. But many more Republicans were envious. They wanted a Republican president who could avoid hard news interviews and press conferences and be praised for his media savvy. They wanted a Republican president who could lob tweets over the heads of the press. They wanted a Republican Obama—a president with universal cultural cachet. And they got it.

There will be some Democrats who refuse to recognize how Trump is building on Obama’s expanded definition of what it means to be presidential because they like Obama’s tweets and celebrity friends and dislike Trump’s. Raw partisanship and motivated reasoning will get you far. But no one could honestly deny that Obama’s warm embrace of celebrity helped deliver us into a new era of political reality television. To quote the former president, one of our biggest collective challenges “is the degree to which we do not share a common baseline of facts.” At least, that’s what he said on David Letterman’s new show on Netflix.

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If you’re a Republican, the polls must be making you nervous. And I’m not talking about the generic congressional ballot or the president’s job approval rating.

In the Trump era, a majority of voters have told pollsters that the wealthy and corporations have too much power, that the financial industry is under-regulated, and that the economy is rigged against them. More than half of voters favor a $15 national minimum wage, regardless of the displacing effects it will have on low-skilled and entry-level workers. Six out of 10 Americans say “it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage” and about half of all Americans support the creation of a government monopoly on health insurance.

This remarkable consensus is due, primarily, to Democratic unity on policy. Where there is real internal tension and, thus, opportunity for Republicans is less about what the Democratic Party’s coalition should strive to achieve but what it should look like.

“I have a problem, guys, with that phrase, ‘identity politics,’” Senator Kamala Harris told a gathering of progressives at the annual Netroots Nation conference this weekend. “That phrase is used to divide, and it is used to distract. Its purpose is to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us. It is used to try and shut us up.” Harris’s attempt to stigmatize attacks on the liberal conception of “identity politics” as a “pejorative” is a savvy preemptive effort to neutralize what may be the left’s biggest weakness: its commitment to racial and demographic hierarchies.

The liberal conundrum was perhaps best illustrated by a collection of protesters who later stormed the Netroots Nation stage. According to the Advocate’s Alex Westwood, the demonstrators attacked the conference for hosting panels dedicated to combating the “white savior” phenomenon. Such panels were considered problematic because they amounted to a demand that minorities volunteer their time to teach white people how to do that which minorities were already doing. Worse, those demands were made “from a position of white comfort.”

Netroots watchers, such as Westwood, would be quick to note that a collection of malcontents disrupts proceedings every year, but it’s of note that this collection is almost always doggedly focused on issues related to race. In 2015, Black Lives Matter activists targeted the self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders for being insufficiently committed to racial justice. Last year, demonstrators shouted down U.S. House Rep. Stacey Evans, a former chair of the state’s Democratic House Caucus, for challenging Stacey Abrams in the gubernatorial primary because she was the first black woman to lead her party in the state’s legislature. “Trust black women,” they shouted.

This contingent may lack raw numerical strength, but it enjoys outsize influence over the political discourse and, thus, the Democratic Party. What’s more, the intra-party dispute threatens to expose deeper fissures within the Democrats’ ascendant progressive wing. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me,’” Sanders argued in 2016. “This is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” This line was opportunistically savaged for being insufficiently “woke” by Hillary Clinton’s communications team, but self-identified democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appears to have internalized Sanders’s admonition.

She leaned into her identity as a Latina woman from the Bronx while savaging those who rely on their accidents of birth to prove progressive bona fides. Her message was lost on Democracy for America spokesman Neil Sroka, who is campaigning on behalf of a progressive Muslim candidate for governor of Michigan recently endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez. “Other than Cynthia Nixon in New York, they are also overwhelmingly young and people of color,” Sroka said of 2018’s class of progressive insurgents, “which also speaks to a rising belief that we need to have leaders of the party who reflect the party, which means more young people, women, and people of color in positions of power.” Nixon, the only exception to the rule Sroka was trying to illustrate, was heralded as the first potential governor of New York who is also openly gay.

Liberals in good standing have warned of the dangers that Democrats face if they dedicate themselves to the kind of divisive identity politics that “breeds its equal and opposite reaction” in the form of a collective racial consciousness among white Americans. Indeed, it will be too tempting for Republicans to avoid following in Donald Trump’s lead and exacerbating racial tensions within the Democratic coalition to siphon off the votes of alienated whites. “We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism,” wrote Columbia University professor Mark Lilla. His recommendation came not just from a place of concern for national comity, but with the best interests of the electoral strength of the Democratic Party in mind.

The progressive left is having none of this. “Apologizing for ‘identity politics’ precipitates an electoral death spiral,” wrote Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Steve Philips, “because it doesn’t work to woo Trump voters, who will always opt for the real racist, and it also depresses the enthusiasm of the very voters we need to win.”

Identity, not economics, is where the fault lines lie within the Democratic coalition. Traditional liberals, even progressives, are not convinced that appeals to racial and demographic solidarity will win back Democratic majorities. The identitarian left is convinced that making overtures toward Donald Trump’s white working-class voters represents a compromise with the unenlightened and racially suspect. And that is where the fight will be; not over Medicare-for-all but over social and racial justice.

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Beginning January 1, 2019, the Trump administration will require hospitals and outpatient clinics to publicly post their prices for surgeries and other medical procedures, according to the Washington Examiner.

Nothing will help rein in ever-rising medical costs more than the kind of price transparency that has been almost wholly absent from American medicine since the coming of medical insurance in the 1930s. Once prices are known and can be compared, competition–capitalism’s secret weapon–will immediately begin to drive prices towards the low end, draining untold billions of dollars in excess charges out of the system. It will also force hospitals to become more efficient and more innovative to stay competitive at the lower price range.

Undoubtedly, insurance companies and large corporations that self-insure will find this information useful. But they already negotiate prices to levels far below the nominal price, just as Medicare does. Those without insurance, who get stuck with the often outrageously high nominal price, will benefit most. With the new transparency, they will be able to compare prices and bargain. “Why are you charging $2X, when the hospital across town will do the same procedure for $1X? Will you match that price?” The Surgery Center of Oklahoma reports that many uninsured patients are already using their prices to get their local hospital to charge less.

(Obviously, this doesn’t apply to emergency care. But that makes up only a small part of total medical costs).

Indeed, Medicare should also be required to post what it actually allows for the various medical procedures it covers (there are over 7,000 in its list), giving non-Medicare patients even more bargaining ammunition. For instance, a recent visit to my back doctor resulted in a charge for $159. Medicare allowed $79.65, slightly over 50 percent, and paid 80 percent of that. My supplemental insurance paid the rest. If the doctor was willing to accept $79.65 as full payment, why was the nominal price $159?

American medicine has a long way to go before its economics are totally out in the open and thus subject, in so far as possible, to market forces. But this is a very big first step.

Chalk up yet another major reform to the Trump administration.

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If the “blue wave” that Democrats see building ahead of November does not arrive with the ferocity they envision, the political left can still take solace in some of the victories they’ve already won. In that event, the Republican Party would have narrowly escaped losing a national referendum, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans have escaped defeat. Even today, the GOP is a broken husk of its former self.

Over the weekend, progressives and liberal populists gathered at the annual Netroots Nation conference to revel in their ascendancy, but their confidence is not unjustified. One after the other, Democratic presidential hopefuls flattered the crowd of activists and, more important, professed their shared policy preferences. A single-payer health care system estimated to cost $32 trillion over a decade, expanded social security, tuition-free college, the forgiveness of student-loan debt, a $15-per-hour national minimum wage, a federal employment guarantee, a dramatic paring back of the nation’s immigration-enforcement agencies; these and more formerly radical ideas are gaining real purchase. Even the centrist Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan swore requisite fealty to the progressive agenda.

Anyone with a sense of modesty and frugality will find this reckless profligacy appalling. Even the immodest possessed of a passing familiarity with unintended consequences must concede, for example, that a massive minimum-wage hike amid a wave of automatization might not be so compassionate after all. But the point of these ideas is not that they are especially feasible—they’re not. The point is just that they deserve to be called ideas. Democrats who dismiss the innumeracy and toxic racial obsession exhibited by their party’s left flank as passionate fringe elements are making a big mistake. The fringe is where the energy is. It’s where the canvassers and the small-dollar donors are. And it’s where the coalition’s ideas are conceived. As such, the fringe doesn’t stay fringe for long.

Republicans know that all too well. At the dawn of this political moment—one that would culminate in the kind of Republican domination of state and federal government unseen in nearly a century—the GOP, too, had its wacky fringe. But the margins weren’t merely sources of embarrassment. They were fonts of enthusiasm and intellectual vitality. The libertarian-tinged conservatives who spent the Obama years organizing, strategizing, and pitching sweeping legislative reforms at CPAC may not have overtaken the GOP, but no one could convincingly argue that they did not have a serious influence on the Republican Party.

Today, that vibrancy is gone. The conservative movement in and out of Congress is not dedicated to the advancement of its ideas but to preventing the other guy’s ideas from coming to fruition.

From the confirmation of judges, whose chief qualification is their opposition to bizarre new readings of the Constitution that justify sweeping liberal policy objectives, to the non-enforcement of onerous regulations by the executive, the stuff that energizes the Republican Party’s activists and intellectuals is utterly unambitious. Gone are the days when conservatives promised to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, devolve federal powers back to the states, scale back the IRS, and render the nation’s ballooning entitlement programs sustainable. Gone is the CPAC that served as an arena of competing ideas. The desire to out-compete the left has been replaced by the fleeting satisfaction of triggering liberals’ gag reflexes on Twitter.

According to Cory Bliss, chief strategist for a PAC dedicated to preserving the GOP’s House majority, the messages that really jazz Republican voters are entirely negative. “If the choice is, ‘Do you want to raise middle-class taxes? Do you want to abolish ICE? Do you want Nancy Pelosi as speaker?’ That’s a debate we’ll win,” he told the New York Times recently. A Republican voter in Ohio’s 12th congressional district summed up the GOP agenda more succinctly: “We’ve got to protect President Trump.” But for what? Republicans asked the public for prohibitive political power and got it, but now that power is dedicated solely to its own preservation.

There’s a lot to be said for running block. William F. Buckley distilled the conservative ethos in National Review’s mission statement as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” and the bulwarks that Republicans have erected in the effort to impede the advance of cultural and economic liberalism are impressive. But there is a concession in all this negative partisanship, and it’s a sad one from the conservative perspective. It is that the legislative phase of this period of unique Republican dominance is over. The ball is not going to advance. The GOP is already on defense.

This strange bunker mentality is entirely unjustified. The appeal of a persecution complex notwithstanding, Republicans are still the masters of their destiny. There are no observable conditions that have forced them into a position of servility. With 92 days to go before the midterms, this docility on the part of the party in power is as inexplicable as it is inexcusable.

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